(Bloomberg) -- Strava launched in 2009 as a niche website for cyclists to log mileage. During the pandemic, it blossomed into a mobile app serving more than 120 million athletes as worldwide lockdowns drove people outdoors.
Now that audience sees something else in Strava: a place to engage more easily with people over a common interest. Its growing appeal reflects a surge in affinity-based platforms — like Letterboxd for movie buffs and GoodReads for book lovers — that provide a refuge from social-media giants, while offering other businesses a new way to target consumers.
Behemoths like Facebook and Instagram still dominate the social-media landscape, with Meta Platforms Inc. reporting 3.27 billion users across properties in June, up 7% from a year earlier. Yet industry analysts and academics see interest-based sites gaining traction as users grow weary of mega-platforms where intimacy and connection have become harder to find among large groups of followers.
“People from work, from your family, people you meet on a date – all of a sudden they’re now part of the same audience,” said Bernie Hogan, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. “People would much rather find people who can appreciate their experience, rather than those who would challenge it.”
Audiences for niche platforms jumped over the past year, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. In the first half of this year, Letterboxd, Strava, and the hiking app AllTrails saw monthly active users grow by 55%, 20%, and 10% year-over-year respectively, Sensor Tower reported. That interest-based approach underpins the business strategy propelling Reddit Inc. in its new life as a public company, where it relies on its niche communities to match advertisers with potential customers.
Letterboxd — majority owned by Canadian tech conglomerate Tiny Ltd. — had over 14 million users in 2024, up from 1.8 million in 2020, according to the company, and its member base, which surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, spans from movie buffs to directors like Martin Scorsese. AllTrails logged more than 60 million members in April 2024, and last year it was named the iPhone App of the Year for its user-friendly design and 450,000 user-curated hiking routes.
Entrepreneurs have sought for years to create more intimate or hobby-focused social networks with varying degrees of success. GoodReads, founded in 2006 and bought in 2013 by Amazon.com Inc., now has more than 150 million members. Others, like the social network Path, which limited how many connections a user could have, received lots of attention and funding in the early 2010s before eventually closing.
Apps like restaurant-ranker Beli rely on basic social-media features such as newsfeeds and the ability to like and comment to foster user engagement. Beli was launched in 2021 by former McKinsey consultants Judy Thelen and Eliot Frost as a platform for people to track places they’ve eaten. Beli’s users have grown nearly 2,000% over the past two years, according to the company.
“We saw a trend where people were gravitating toward collecting experiences,” said Thelen, who serves as Beli’s chief executive officer.
Strava — the Swedish word for “strive” — was founded 15 years ago by former Harvard rowers Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath. Its investors include Sequoia Capital, Go4it Capital, Jackson Square Ventures and Madrone Capital Partners, a family office tied to the billionaire Walton family.
Last year, Strava introduced a messaging feature letting users chat directly with other athletes that will soon be integrated into Strava Clubs — enabling groups to create discussion channels around specific workouts or races, similar to forums on Reddit.
Alex Scott, a 24-year-old software engineer from California, said he was reducing his usage of big social media in favor of smaller apps geared to his interests. In addition to Strava and GoodReads, Scott said he also uses Letterboxd and Airbuds, a social music listening widget that launched in late 2022 and is currently ranked No. 7 in Music on Apple’s App store.
“With these hobby apps, socialization with my friends is less of an event,” Scott said. “On Instagram, you’re often posting something only because it’s a big thing, and it’s usually people I don’t really care about, but with Strava you’re just like, ‘My friend went on a run.’”
Affinity-based apps offer a natural opportunity for companies to reach a target audience, especially users who have started tuning out larger platforms, said Karen North, a digital social media professor at USC Annenberg. Some niche apps are seizing the marketing opportunity: Letterboxd, for example, works directly with movie studios and distributors to organize screenings ahead of a film’s release by sending private invitations to members.
“These advanced screenings are the most useful for capturing sentiment from people already predisposed to liking a certain film and for figuring out a more targeted marketing campaign,” said Gemma Gracewood, Letterboxd’s editor in chief.
Since its founding in 2009, Strava has partnered with businesses ranging from fast-food chain Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. to footwear company Brooks. Like Letterboxd, most of the fitness app’s revenue comes from subscription users who pay for premium features such as segment leader boards and training analysis.
Bigger networks like Facebook are also recognizing that not everyone wants to see content in one giant feed. Facebook is pushing users toward Groups as a destination with more intimacy and discussion than the site’s main feed. More than 1.8 billion people use Groups on Facebook every month, and X also rolled out its own version in 2021 called Communities.
“The Facebooks and the Instagrams of the world have staying power in large part because they’ve become a search engine for our social lives,” North said. “But as social animals, we ultimately want to come together around shared experiences and shared ideas.”
--With assistance from Kurt Wagner and Aisha Counts.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.